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Public service announcement: uninstall your antivirus . Seriously, it's probably just 'helpfully' intercepting all HTTPS connections .
One of the most fascinating things about the sudden popularity of neural nets at doing things humans also do is the differing shapes of failure modes. For example, humans might mistake a plastic bag for a bird but we're not likely to think abstract art is actually a pengiun . It turns out that you can exploit this difference to make 'voice' commands that only computers can understand .
I've heard for a while that a mixture of Maalox and water is a good treatment for tear gas but it always kind of sounded like an urban legend. I didn't realize that it had been tested and actually works!
You've got to respect a game that, when faced with a reputation for enabling Space Hitler, doubles down and enhances the mechanics . (I tease because I love, Stellaris is great)
More evidence that we're starting be able to manipulate biology more easily: blight-resistant chestnut trees , cancer 'cured' in infants , paralysis reversed with stem cells .
Weather radar is awesome but it's easily messed with . Turns out lots of things interfere .
In the "jobs that won't exist soon" department: Roughneck . Of course, since the oil and gas were found by robots in the first place, it's only fair that the robots do the extraction .
I'm always up for examining weird, unpopular programming languages and this lovely examination of using Kdb+ and Q to examine taxi ride metadata definitely fits. HN comments on this article and similar articles featuring Amazon's Athena , MapD on Nvidia , AWS , Redshift , and Elasticsearch . If Q sounds fun, there's a book appropriately called Q for Mortals .
Finally, someone is building the small, arm SoC with gigabit and sata that I've always wanted: EspressoBin . Looks like they fully funded but the updates don't show up for non backers :(
Speaking of ARM, some newer arm chipsets have big.LITTLE architectures, with one small core for low-energy idle-ish workloads and a beefier one that spins up when there's real work to do. No problem, unless for some reason you didn't write your code to assume that the length of your cache line might change at any time during execution .
A good HN thread on Peloton from last week .
Another new nuclear reactor type, the molten-salt based Terrestiral Energy , intends to seek a license beginning in 2019 .
Solarflare claims to have 20ns latency with a restricted userspace tcp stack . Nice if you don't mind dropping $1500 on a NIC .